Julie Barlow grew up in Ancaster, Ontario, and Jean-Benoît Nadeau in Sherbrooke, Quebec. The couple met in the late 80s at McGill University in Montreal, where they set out to master the other’s mother tongue. After graduating, both worked as freelance journalists, published widely in Canada’s national magazines in English and French…and then got married.

In 1999, the couple moved to France, where they wrote Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong, published in 2003. The Daily Telegraph said the book “should be handed out at Calais and Charles de Gaulle airport to anyone hoping to get a grip on France.” Praised in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Globe and Mail and 60 other media, the book went on to become an international bestseller in North America, Europe and Asia.

Barlow and Nadeau then travelled the French-speaking world to research their next book, a popular history of the French language as it is spoken across the planet. Published in 2006, the Montreal Gazette called The Story of French “a mind-altering experience.” Translated into French and Japanese, it won the 2007 Mavis Gallant Award for Nonfiction. The French adaption, Le Français quelle histoire! won France’s 2011 Prix La Renaissance Française. This book also inspired a two-hour documentary which was aired on France Culture in July 2014.

The couple’s next move was to Phoenix, Arizona, where they explored the growth of the Spanish language in the United States. In 2013 they published The Story of Spanish, a popular history of Spanish as it’s spoken on two continents. The Los Angeles Times praised it as “…and engaging new nonfiction book” and “a rich history of the language.” Maclean’s magazine and The Economist both wrote articles about it.

In 2013-2014, they spent a year in Paris to research and write their new book on the French, The Bonjour Effect: The Secret Codes of French Conversation Revealed (St. Martin’s Press, 2016). This book explores how the French talk – about small things and big issues, about themselves and the world.

Nadeau and Barlow have spoken to audiences across Canada, the U.S., in Europe and Japan. Their work has appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, The International Herald Tribune, France’s L’Express, the Courrier international and more. Together and separately, they have published 10 books, written over 1000 articles, and won more than 30 journalism and literary awards.

Avid travellers, Barlow and Nadeau lived in Paris, where Nadeau was a fellow of the Washington-based Institute for Current World Affairs, Toronto, and Phoenix Arizona, where Barlow was a Fulbright Scholar at Arizona State University. Nadeau and Barlow are regular contributors to Canada’s main national public affairs magazine L’actualité.

Trilingual in English, French and Spanish, the couple is based in Montreal, where they live with their twin daughters.

Suddenly Home EIGHT: Beginning of the Day Rituals (or why it's so important to put off going to work a little every day...)

In my decades listening to friends talk about their jobs, I’ve noticed people like to get to work as quickly as possible.

Morning commutes aren’t joy rides, I get that. But what people who work outside the home might not realize – that is, until they join the home office tribe – is that it's not all bad. Going to work gives them time to get used to the idea of … going to work.

People who travel to work have a buffer zone before getting into performance mode: they get to wake up, eat breakfast, drink coffee, shower, get dressed, commune with their kids (or pets) and then walk, bike, drive or bus to their destination. It’s a great excuse to listen to the radio, or read or listen to podcasts or just think about other things.

For us home workers, little of this applies. When you skip the transport and personal preparation part, which is not essential most days, we have a pretty skimpy morning routine and no built in time for a bit of day dreaming.

I never thought that was fair. Call it a self-designed buffer zone, or creatively putting off the inevitable, as a self-employed person, I have always thought I deserved to ease into the day just like everyone else.

Since I have still have children at home, the first chunk of my morning is boilerplate: I wake the kids up, make sure they eat, give them an excuse to roll their eyes at someone who asks stupid questions.

But when my girls are on the sidewalk heading to school, I do not head straight to the office. I am usually in the living room reading my assortment of newspapers.

Everywhere I’ve lived and worked, I have created some kind of morning ritual that combines coffee, newsprint and sweat. Many mornings I do a Pilates workout while listening to the news. In different times and places, I have gone on a regular morning walk, or even a ski in nearby Parc Maisonneuve.

This means getting up earlier than required by the 40-hour week, but it’s worth it. Being able to switch out a commute for morning exercise is probably the greatest advantage of working at home.

Whatever you feel like doing, I’d recommend some kind of pre-work ritual to anyone who works at home. You might not be doing this forever, but it’s probably not going to be over soon. Being in automatic pilot for the first hour or so of the day helps you feel normal and ignore the eternal question of whether you really want to work at all. (In my case, it also lets the creative juices start flowing.)

Don’t get me wrong. I love my work and I usually wake up with ideas and projects. But that doesn’t mean I always feel like executing them. I wouldn’t go as far to claim a morning routine make you a better worker. It just helps you get to work without wondering if you really want to be there.

In my last post (Keeping the Kids at a Distance) I mentioned how my husband and I have learned to give our daughters the run the house during our work hours.

We just ignore the collateral damage until the end of the day. It’s the only way to keep our parenting duties (all but the essential ones) from dragging us away from work.

In an earlier post I also explained why you have to stake out physical territory to keep your concentration.

You need to protect your professional mindset as well.

In my experience, any activity related to cleaning or organizing household items is a direct threat to work. Sound paradoxical? Cleaning up craft supplies, filling the dishwasher and folding laundry seem like useful activities to squeeze into work hours, but they’re not. When you are trying to work, they are distractions.

If you don’t put housework off until you leave the office, it will suck the life out of your workday.

It might be the hardest thing to ignore, but everyone working at home has to resist the siren call of the kitchen sink. I might be hardcore, but I also avoid filling the dishwasher.

If you are new at the home office, you have seen just how fast the pile grows when you cook three meals at home. For those of working with kids at home, this has become to be infinitely harder. Because even when kids or teenagers occupy themselves during the day, they eat.

Still, even though the stack of dishes has reached a new scale, from Monday to Friday, we let it grow until we clock out of the office. Same goes for everything else lying around the house. When I see open paperback novels, pens, erasers, markers, USB keys and phone chargers littering my living space, I just move on until I get “home from work.”

One trick I have for avoiding the housework trap is to make sure whatever else I do during the day has a beginning and an end. Like a walk. Or a cup of coffee. We all know housework is a bottomless well. Starting chores in the middle of the day is like jumping down the rabbit hole with a rag and a bottle of bleach.

If I’m not making coffee, eating lunch or catering to another essential need, I try to leave the premises for a break. Yes, that was easier a month ago when it was still legal to step off our front porch. But even quick walk around the block is better than sliding down the slippery slope of housework.

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